Holy Shmoly! » traffic

Irish traffic to drive on right

Donncha O Caoimh — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 10:30:23 +0000

The Irish Government will start the process of converting our traffic system to a right hand drive one in the next few months. The current system of driving on the left is a legacy of British rule in this country but now that we’re part of the EU this change is finally taking place. Grandad has more details on his blog.

I expect this will be a welcome change for tourists and foreign travelers to our shores, especially Polish people who will no doubt start businesses teaching people to drive on the ~~wrong~~ other side of the road.

Initially, all buses and articulated vehicles will move to the right to allow for a period of adjustment. Car owners may opt to make the switch themselves on an individual basis, depending on their level of confidence.

Starting on the 1st of August, all motorists outside city limits will be required to drive on the right. And finally on the 1st September, all city traffic will make the transition.

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Ray & Jenny, Pat, and Pamela – thanks!

Donncha O Caoimh — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 10:46:33 +0000

Yesterday’s announcement, the fiasco on the Late Late Show on Friday night and now Pamela Anderson’s divorce drove a lot of traffic yesterday. (People started looking for her video again!) As you can see from the Google Analytics graph, soon after 8am in the morning the flood started after Ian Dempsey mentioned the birth.

I took the opportunity to move In Photos to a new Xen server on Xen Planet for a short test period. If you see posts there without the comments form you’re looking at the old site and your DNS hasn’t updated yet. It should be complete in a few hours. The new site is a 64MB xen server and it’s holding up well. I’m toying with the idea of using Lighttpd, especially as a lot of thumbnails will be served from that host but I won’t have time to work on that until the weekend. Every night this week is already booked up with one thing or another.

In other news, moving a WordPress site to a new host is fairly painless!

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WordPress developer in near miss auto accident!

Donncha O Caoimh — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 17:57:34 +0000

Press the button on the traffic light, wait for the green man, walk. It’s simple. Cars generally stop and obey a red light or risk two penalty points if seen by a member of an Garda Siochana. Unfortunately they can’t be at every street junction every hour of the day.

Jacinta and I were walking across the road at the North Gate, a busy intersection, with relatively complicated lights. Pedestrians be warned, wait for the lights! Cars come from all directions! The green man was flashing so it was safe enough, we thought. An ambulance was trying to get through the red light in front of us so we stopped, still, the green man was doing his thing, shaking his stuff, and generally flashing on and off. All’s ok, until there’s the loud blare of a car horn, a louder engine powers a green VW Passat across the junction from North Bridge and swerves just behind us, missing us by perhaps a few inches!

We were shocked, but I looked after them and recognised the same green Volkswagen Passat I had seen two days previously. Dark windows, a big VW badge dangling off the center mirror and the name of some exhaust maker on the back window. That time I had been driving, they were in front of me, and had raced off when lights turned green, lane hopping like there was no tomorrow, in a 50km/h zone. Ironically, they were stuck at the lights going to Mayfield and I passed them a moment later..

It’s a mad world out there, I’ll post a picture of the car next time I see it.

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